Is Job-Growth Slowdown a Good Thing?

Because, according a report by Bloomberg: “If the expansion is going to get a second wind, it’s likely to come in the form of faster wage gains.”

Excepts:

“The U.S. economy is still creating lots of jobs, with a seasonally adjusted 148,000 added in December and 2.2 million (not seasonally adjusted, for reasons I discuss below) for full-year 2017, according to Friday’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That 2.2 million is up a little (93,000 jobs, to be misleadingly precise about it) from 2016’s total, but it’s down substantially from earlier in the current economic expansion.

(…) We may be about to experience another such second wind now, as a business sector encouraged by tax cuts and deregulatory attitudes in Washington invests in job-creating new projects. But don’t expect it to be all that dramatic with the unemployment rate at just 4.1 percent — about as low as it has been since the late 1960s. 1 The prime-working-age (ages 25 to 54) employment-population ratio is still well below its late-1990s peak, indicating some remaining labor-market slack, but the prime-age population, which was growing in the late 1980s and 1990s, really isn’t now. If this expansion does in fact get a second wind, it seems likelier to pay out in wage gains than in accelerating job growth.